Order of Aimee Bender Books

Aimee Bender is an American author of surrealist fiction novels. Her stories often blend magical realism with dark humour, exploring the strange, whimsical, and sometimes unsettling aspects of everyday life. Bender’s works include the short story collection The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and novels such as An Invisible Sign of My Own and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, earning her acclaim for her lyrical prose and inventive storytelling.

Aimee Bender made her debut in 1998 with the aforementioned collection The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. Below is a list of Aimee Bender’s books in order of when they were originally released:

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

If You Like Aimee Bender Books, You’ll Love…

• Ian McEwan
• Raven Leilani
• Haruki Murakami

Aimee Bender Synopses: In An Invisible Sign of My Own by Aimee Bender, Mona Gray was ten when her father fell ill, and from that moment she became a quitter – abandoning every talent just as joy became intense. The only thing she cannot stop is math: counting steps, knocking on wood, and imagining people in the park multiplied against one another.

When Mona begins teaching math to second-graders, she finds a receptive audience – but life’s difficult and wonderful realities keep intruding. She is drawn to the new science teacher, whose unnerving ability to see through her carefully constructed façade challenges her in unexpected ways.

Bender masterfully guides her characters, giving them emotional depth while placing them in a world that is at once calamitous, surreal, and startlingly familiar.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a standalone novel by Aimee Bender. On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in each slice. To her horror, the cheerful flavor she expects reveals only despair.

Soon, Rose becomes privy to the hidden truths of her family: her father’s detachment, her mother’s transgressions, her brother’s retreat from the world. But some secrets are too deep, even for her cursed taste buds to uncover.

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is a collection by Aimee Bender. A grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library. A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home seeking total abandon – he only wants to watch game shows. A woman falls in love with a hunchback, but leaves him when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis. A wife, reunited with her husband after the war, struggles with the heartrending question: can she still love a man who has no lips?

Aimee Bender’s stories explore a world twisted on its axis, a place of unconventional beauty and grotesque reality. From the first line of each tale, she signals that she is telling a story, but the moral is never quite what you expect. Her prose is musical, colloquial, and inimitably heartrending.

The Butterfly Lampshade by Aimee Bender is a standalone title. On the night her mother is taken to a mental hospital, eight-year-old Francie drinks a dead butterfly she finds floating in a glass of water – a small, strange act that haunts her for years. Twenty years later, she revisits that moment and two other childhood incidents, trying to understand their hold on her and what they reveal about her place in the world.

As Francie wrestles with memory and reality, the intensity of childhood perception shows how ordinary objects can carry otherworldly power – and whether that power survives into adulthood.